Michael A. De Leon is a graphic designer by day, but wears many hats in his off time. In 2004, after several years of covering the Spurs, he started Project Spurs, a Spurs team fansite as an outlet to provide content to Spurs fans, while continuing to write for himself and learning the ins and outs of online publishing and web design. He has since built a writing team and started a popular weekly Spurs podcast called the Spurscast.

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Duncan still best bet for fantasy owners

With the season fast approaching and NBA fantasy drafts coming even sooner, I talked to fantasy analyst Erik Ong of Give Me The Rock about where fantasy owners, and specifically Spurs fans, should look at drafting Spurs players.

While it is easy as a Spurs fan to make impulse decisions, like drafting Tim Duncan with the first overall pick or Tiago Splitter midway through the draft, Ong says it’s best to be patient. picking up key pieces early on before you draft your fan favorite.

While Duncan may have gone in the first round years ago and even a lottery pick before then, you should be able to draft him in the third round after you’ve gone after some multi-category all-stars.

“Tim Duncan is in decline but it is shorter or smaller in increments in comparison to the other big men. Tim Duncan is quite good in the first half of the season, but his numbers go down in the second half of the season because Pop rests him more,” Ong said. “He actually played two less minutes per game in 2009-2010. That being said, we’ve only downgraded him slightly, we have slotted him in temporarily at 30th overall, which is still pretty decent with all these young guns popping up.”

“As far as the four spot, it’s quite tight in the second round, so he’s going to slide down a bit. As far as consistency and reliability, I’d still say Tim Duncan is still your money bet, followed by Manu.”

Click HERE for the complete article including an audio interview at Project Spurs.